[The Book of the Gods 01] - The Face of Apollo

by Fred Saberhagen

  If it was true that no one was actively hunting him, then maybe he had overestimated the importance of Sal's mysterious gift—and of himself as its custodian and her messenger. Was it possible that the raid he had just survived had been launched for some purpose unconnected with Sal and her treasure? Or for no purpose at all except as an exercise in savagery? But Jeremy had trouble believing that. The men riding into the village had been intent and purposeful, though the creatures they commanded had blundered; and Sal, though terrified to see them, had not been really surprised.

  So far Sal's treasure had escaped the hands of those maraud­ers. Not that Jeremy felt he could take any credit. Only sheer good luck, it seemed to him, had thrown them off his track. No one could rely on good luck, but it seemed that he had nothing better.

  Over the next couple of days he also saw cavalry patrols, lancers mounted on long-necked cameloids, one-hump mutated droms, their insignia obscured with camouflage, plodding their way along the shore. But the men were looking for something or someone else. Jeremy took care to keep out near midriver, but the man onshore showed no interest in him or his boat.

  Except for these occasional glimpses of bodies of armed men, Jeremy encountered very little traffic on the river. He supposed that with war flaring in the region, people who had any choice about the matter had fled to safer places or were staying home. It was also possible that many boats had been commandeered by one faction or another.

  As Jeremy steadily paddled south and west, the country visi­ble along the riverbanks changed, becoming different in striking ways from anything he could remember ever seeing before. Veg­etation was somewhat thicker, and the air seemed wetter, inten­sifying the late summer's heat. The river was broader and deeper, having merged with others—whether the stream he now trav­eled should still be called the Aeron was more than Jeremy could say. Wild birds he could not recognize flew crying overhead.

  The information Sal had failed to give him was now available in his new memory. Still, Jeremy did not know just where he was in relation to Pangur Ban and could only guess how far he might still have to go to reach the city or the Academy. Regarding the Academy his new memory gave him relatively little help.

  Once or twice when passing one of the rare fishing boats he thought of hailing them and asking how far the sea might be. But he didn't do so, not wanting the local people to remember a young stranger on a long journey.

  Every night, a little after sunset, Jeremy pushed off from his day's place of concealment and resumed his cruise downstream.

  And eventually there came a night when he beheld a strange sight, low in the sky ahead of him. All night long there arose in the distance, reflected against clouds, a faint, odd, attractive glow that was visible only through his left eye. On the next night it was back again, a little brighter and a few miles nearer. The source, whatever it might be, was vastly closer and lower than the Moun­tain.

  The river was changing around him, first day by day, then hour by hour. Gradually, at first, then suddenly in an explosion of channels and multiplication of islands. The stream spread out to an indeterminate width and began to lose itself, dividing into a hundred lesser flows.

  Long days ago he'd lost the count of days and nights, but the feeling was growing in him that the goal of his journey must be near. Wanting to keep a sharp lookout for the Academy or any­thing that might give him a clue to its location, Jeremy decided now to travel by daylight.

  On the first afternoon of progress under this new regime he noted that the mysterious glow was now bright enough to be seen by day. Pallidly visible only through his left eye, it appeared low in the northwest sky, ahead of him and to his right.

  By midafternoon he had drawn much closer. The source itself was still out of sight behind several ranks of island trees. This mild light, now rippling in a way that seemed to beckon, was the very opposite of the red warning signals with which his left eye had tagged the Kalakh canoes.

  Jeremy paddled toward it. Now listening carefully, he could barely detect, with both ears, the distant sound of a woman's voice. It was far too faint to let him make out words, but she seemed to be shouting, ranting about something.

  Accepting the glow as guidance provided by some friendly god, Jeremy was soon paddling down a smaller channel. Presently this led him into a backwater bayou, a serpentine of water almost motionless—and this again, at its farther end, into a more active channel. All the land above water was thickly over­grown with trees and dense underbrush.

  He thought the source of the strange illumination was now lit­tle more than a hundred yards ahead. The brightness was slowly fading as he drew near, as if its only reason for existence had been to capture his attention.

  When he had put a dozen or so of the taller intervening trees behind him, there came into his view the upper portion of a strange half-ruined building, towering above the screen of jungle that still intervened.

  Jeremy had not gone much farther in its direction when he heard the woman's voice again, carrying strongly across an ex­panse of open water. It was shrill but strong, raised in fierce argument—but no, he presently decided, not really argument, because no one ever answered. Rather, she was engaged in a stri­dent, prolonged, abusive harangue. He could not make out all the words, but he got the impression that several people were objects of her wrath. It would be an unlucky individual indeed who caught it all.

  In the boy's left ear her voice sounded with a mellow ring, dis­tinguishing it from the fishwife screeching he'd sometimes heard from villages or other boats as he passed them. He took this to mean that there was something good about it—good for him at least.

  Now he was no more than about fifty yards away from the bellicose woman. Paddling slowly and cautiously, keeping a sharp eye on the scene before him as it was gradually revealed by the curving channel, the boy deftly pulled his canoe behind a screen of reeds close to the marshy shoreline and looked out through them to get a good view of the huge, looming structure, whatever it might be. Docked immediately in front of it was a kind of boat or raft that Jeremy Redthorn's eyes had never seen before—and yet it was disturbingly familiar. The glow that had guided him thus far was emanating from this vessel—and now that he had come in direct sight of it, that strange illumination faded, evidently having served its purpose.

  At the edge of the channel rose half-ruined stone walls per­haps forty feet high and of formidable thickness, the remains of a building whose size and shape were totally unlike those of any structure familiar to Jeremy Redthorn. Even in its fallen state the massive structure was by far the largest that he had ever seen. It rose out of the swamp in the form of an irregularly truncated pyramid, built of blocks of stone, most of them much bigger than a man might lift. Here and there vegetation was growing out of the structure, where time had eaten cracks and holes into its fabric—some of the plants were only moss and vines, but in sev­eral spots sizable trees put forth their twisted branches. Windows in the shape of pointed arches framed various degrees of interior darkness, and here and there a doorway was visible, reached by the remnants of an exterior stair.

  Looking at the ruin, Jeremy felt an inward jar, an unexpected sense of familiarity. Somewhere in the seemingly bottomless pool of his new memories he thought there lurked knowledge of the purpose of this building and even a good approximation of what it must have looked like when it was new. But those memories conveyed no sense of urgency, and calling them up could wait.

  A good part of what had once been an extensive stone dock in front of the odd building seemed to have crumbled away. The un­familiar boat tied up at the narrow portion that remained was much larger and rode much higher in the water than Jeremy's tiny craft. The single mast rising from the deck between its joined twin hulls bore a flag, marked with the stylized symbol of a burn­ing torch. Jeremy recognized it at once as the Academy logo.

  He had only a moment in which to wonder how he had been able to make the identification—conceivably Sal had mentioned it to him. But he
had to admit to himself that the memory was more likely a part of the frighteningly great trove that had come into his head along with her mysterious treasure.

  As soon as Jeremy focused his attention on the boat before him, his new memory served up the type's proper name—he was looking at a catamaran. This example consisted of twin narrow hulls of shallow draft, some thirty feet in length, surmounted by a flat platform, somewhat narrow in relation to the length of the boat. On the platform, just a little aft of amidships, stood a square-built house or shelter. Just aft of this deckhouse, an awning covered a kind of galley, which would no doubt be cen­tered on a box of sand in which to keep a fire. Each of the twin hulls was enclosed, providing considerable sheltered space be­lowdecks.

  The name, painted on the near side of the nearest hull (and he presumed it would be also on the far side of the other), was Argos. The word conveyed rich meanings—or Jeremy could tell that it would have done, had he allowed himself to probe for them in his new memory.

  In a vessel of this type, the crew, none of whom were now in evidence, probably slept on deck, under another awning, which was was now half-fallen, adding to the general picture of disar­ray. The craft could be propelled by oars or by a fore-and-aft spritsail—Jeremy could now vaguely recognize the type, and a moment's thought brought up more terminology, as well as un­derstanding. Neither sail nor oars were ready to be used just now, being both in disarray.

  When the boy directed his penetrating left-eye gaze at the ves­sel, he was also able to recognize certain kinds of lamps and var­ious nautical tools and pieces of equipment, things that Jeremy Redthorn had never laid eyes on before.

  But he had little time to spare just now for such details. His gaze was immediately drawn to the slender figure of a woman, white-haired but lithe and energetic, who was pacing back and forth with desperate energy on the nearby dock. Behind her, the walls of irregular stonework went up, sloped back, then again straight up, and angling back again, toward a broken pinnacle of structure more than four stories above the greasy-looking surface of the sluggish channel that curved around the building so as to front it on two sides.

  Above the woman, partly over the boat and partly over the platform where she was standing, hung the single sail, half-furled, awkward and useless. Happily for sail and boat, there was practically no wind at the moment. She was waving her arms and calling at random, in distress, though more in anger than in panic. Her manner was that of a woman who fully expected someone to hear her and pay attention but was unsure of just who her audience might be or where they were

  From a distance the white hair hanging almost to her shoul­ders seemed to be tightly curled. Her face had a pinkish cast, suggesting sunburn. Her feet wore sandals; her slender body was clad in neat trousers and tunic, suggesting a kind of uniform, in which the color white predominated.

  In one hand the woman occasionally brandished a short sword, which she waved about as if trying to threaten someone with it. But the object of her wrath was nowhere to be seen, and she seemed to have no clear idea as to the direction in which it, or he, or they might be found. At intervals she again replaced the weapon in a sheath that hung from a broad leather belt and put both hands to other use.

  Supine beside her, on the stone quay along the broken, magic-glowing temple (and the oddness of the building kept demand­ing Jeremy's attention: who would have constructed such a thing in the middle of a vast swamp?) debated with the headless stat­ues of peculiar monsters, lay the figure of a dark-haired, dark-skinned man, nude except for a skimpy loincloth and so motionless that Jeremy at first believed him dead. Then he saw the man's head turn slowly from side to side; life had not fled. Ex­perience that was not Jeremy Redthorn's, though now it had come to dwell in him, interpreted the quivering of the fellow's arms and legs as the final tremors of some kind of fit, not dan­gerous to life. He lay surrounded by an incomplete layout of magical stuff, debris suggesting that the fellow had been struck down in the very midst of his calculations or incantations, while trying to prepare himself for the visitation of a god.

  Suddenly Jeremy took note of the fact that the Argos was not tied up properly at the quay. The nearest stone bollard to which it might have been secured was crumbling as part of the pyra­mid's general decay. Only the feebleness of the current just there kept the vessel from drifting slowly away.

  A slight breeze was now stirring the leaves of the swampy for­est whose nearest branches actually overhung the catamaran, and the half-furled sail flapped ineffectively. The watching boy wondered if the Argos was supposed to be driven or guided by some sort of magic. If so, the magic did not appear to be work­ing. There were always stories about magic that did work or that had worked in Grandfather's youth, but Jeremy Redthorn in his own short life had never seen any—at least not until the past few days.

  Ever since Sal's treasure had gone flowing like some enchanted liquor into Jeremy's head, he had been struggling more or less continuously with a kind of mental vertigo, a condition having nothing to do with physical dizziness or balance—or with tra­ditional ideas of magic. It was as if his mind now stood upon a narrow and slippery beam, teetering over an absolute ocean of new memory, a sea of experience and knowledge to which he had no right. Fear whispered to him that if he ever fell, plunged wholly into those depths, he might very well be drowned, his very self dissolved to nothingness in an alien sea.

  Trying hard now to distract himself from such horrors, he con­centrated his attention on the Argos, which had been built with a marvelous precision. All visible surfaces were painted or var­nished. The lines and the white sail looked new, not stained or rotted. The whole equipage was very well cared for, or had been at least until very recently—but now Jeremy thought that an air of futility had descended on the whole enterprise, magical and mundane.

  It was not only the sail that seemed to have been suddenly abandoned. Several oars were also lying around on deck, as if the crew had simply let them fall before abandoning ship. At least one oar had gone overboard and was slowly drifting away. There were a few spare weapons also, a short spear in one place, a bow and quiver of arrows in another.

  Jeremy was getting the impression that it was the absent crew who were the targets of the lady's wrath. She was carrying on as if they might be hiding somewhere nearby, in range of her voice, though actually that seemed unlikely. One of the angry woman's problems, and probably not the smallest one, was that the whole damned boat now seemed to be drifting helplessly.

  Well, that problem, at least, might be one that Jeremy could do something about.

  Somewhere in Jeremy's head, but by some intelligence not part of the mind with which he had been born, an estimate was being made: To judge by the fittings of the catamaran, and the num­ber of spare oars currently available, there probably ought to be six or eight people in her normal crew. The present situation could be explained by assuming that they had all jumped ship and run off. Maybe they had been frightened by the illness of the dark-skinned man—or perhaps the explanation lay elsewhere.

  Again the woman's thin, high voice was raised in impreca­tions, which seemed to be directed at no one she could actually see. At this distance her words carried clearly across the water, to be easily heard by Jeremy's ears, both right and left. Her lan­guage was the common one of Jeremy Redthorn's homeland, her accents quite understandable to someone from the villages. He listened with awe and a kind of admiration. She had thought up some truly venomous and special curses to bestow upon the people—Jeremy was now virtually certain that she meant the deserting crew—who had left her in this predicament. Now and then she paused for breath, gazing into the distance as if she hoped to catch sight of the objects of her wrath, who had to be somewhere out there.

  These two people were obviously individuals of some impor­tance, and their flag said they were connected with the Acad­emy. Helping them ought to give Jeremy the very opening he needed toward the fulfillment of his vow to Sal.

  The boy in his canoe, continuing
to observe the couple from behind his screen of reeds, raised a hand to scratch his itchy scalp and was glad that he had decided long days ago to wash off the dried mud.

  Springing into action, he paddled his canoe briskly to the woman's assistance, adroitly detouring a few yards to pick up the drifting oar before the listless current got around to bearing it away. Then, after securing his own small vessel to the catama­ran, he climbed aboard and seized the line with which the woman was already struggling.

  The woman quickly became aware of his approach but did not appear surprised by it; she stood nodding in Jeremy's direc­tion, with her small fists planted on her hips, as if she wondered what had taken him so long. It's about time, her attitude seemed to say. About time the world woke up to its duty and came to her assistance. Her clothing, while of practical design for an active person in hot weather, proclaimed her as wealthy, and a fine gold collar around her neck confirmed this.

  Quickly she sized up Jeremy—he realized that he must present an odd-looking figure—but she made no comment. She spoke to him imperiously.

  "Thank all the gods." She made a brisk summoning gesture. "Come aboard quick; give me a hand here."

  "Yes'm."

  As he drew close, he saw that at a distance her whitish hair had deceived even his new keen eyesight. At close range he could see that the face beneath it, despite its stern expression, was very young. She was probably no older than Jeremy himself. Eyes even greener than his own and sharp elfin features. Several of the girl's small fingers bore valuable rings.

  She had now ceased, for the moment, her scolding and curs­ing of the absent boatmen. Obviously her chief concern, as she ran about with the incongruous sheathed sword banging against her slender legs, was the man's welfare.